I like to write about movies of all sorts: old and new, good and bad, mainstream and obscure, local and foreign.
Warning: some articles in this blog may be offensive to fans of James Bond, Jean-Luc Godard, and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.

Sunday, 3 January 2016

Introducing Crime Week

So last week I decided to run a theme, which ended up being war, as a way of starting to get back into my film-based writings. War Movie Week is officially done, but now it turns out I'll have more free time this week than I originally thought, so why not do another theme? Part of the rationale behind choosing war as last week's genre was that we were coming out of the Christmas period and I was subverting its traditional association with peace. To continue that theme, why don't we subvert a different value associated with Christmas: generosity.

To see the opposite of generosity, one needs look no further than the criminal underworld. So between Monday and Friday, I will be watching five different crime films. Similar to my previous week, I will be breaking up each day into a specific category based on a different type of crime, with a few possible candidates for each that will be selected on their respective days. This roster won't be as linear as last week's (where I was able to organize each day by time period), so I am instead sorting the crimes alphabetically. Here is the official schedule for the week:

Monday: Gangsters

Tuesday: Gambling

Wednsday: Heists

Thursday: Murder!

Friday: Prisonbreak!

As before, you can let me know what you think in the comments. Feel free to recommend crime films based on the above categories, though I can't make any promises that I will watch your recommendations for this event.

Those do sound like good choices, out of which I've seen three. I don't have The Public Enemy unfortunately, but I did watch it in one of my classes. There probably would be some good material in a film like that, or other contemporary gangster films given they were part of what led to the enforcement of the production code. Perhaps at some point I should try and do a study of how the gangster film has evolved since then.